From the sping issue of 3rd Wednesday, this poem was an honorable mention in our annual poetry contest.
Notes for Wedding Vows / Peter Schireson
Author: Editorial Staff
Infinity Standing Up / Drew Pisarra
Infinity Standing Up by Drew Pisarra
A DELIGHTFUL COLLECTION OF LOVE SONNETS
“A stunning collection of unique and eclectic observations of modern love which I’m sure Shakespeare himself would be pleased to see is ‘holding a mirror up to life.’ If Wes Anderson and Miranda July had a Queer love-child, they’d write like this.”
– Anna Girvan, Creative Fellow with the Royal Shakespeare Company
“Rhyming and skipping his way through jaggedly sexualized and playful, formal sonnets with serendipity and style (“Devour me! Think me not some crazy nut.”), Drew Pisarra has written a rousing and unusual collection of poems that respond with see-saw emotion to a lover who comes and goes, with difficulty and love. Puns abound; titles tease. These sonnets will knock you out, and you’ll return to them again.”
– Diane Mehta, How to Write Poetry (2005)
“These poems navigate the rapids of desire in a form that was made for twists and turns of feeling, from the derangement of lust to rueful self-reflection. Drew Pisarra honors the Shakespearean sonnet’s tradition of wit and economy, while simultaneously delivering the pleasurable shock of 21st-century idiom.”
– Joan Larkin, Cold River (Lambda Literary Award)
About Drew Pisarra: The author once toured his monologues around the country and even had a ventriloquist act but has since retired from the world of dummies. His short story collection Publick Spanking was published by Future Tense some time ago. More recently as part of the installation art duo Saint Flashlight (with Molly Gross), he’s been finding inventive ways to get poetry into public spaces.
About Capturing Fire Press: This independent publishing house was founded by Regie Cabico and seeks to promote politically charged performance and experimental poetry of the highest quality by diverse queer poets from around the globe.
For more information, contact capfirepress@gmail.com or email the author directly at mistermysterio@hotmail.com
The Sower / Zoe Robles
3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week is a prize winning poem from our annual poetry contest. It appears in the spring issue of the magazine, now available in print at Amazon or as a free download from our website.
Review and Interview with 3rd Wednesday Editor
Pulp, the Ann Arbor District Library’s web site for the arts has published an interview with the editor of 3rd Wednesday and a review of his poetry collection “Protective Coloration“.
When You Get Here / Shutta Crum
Here’s everything you want in poetry. Understandable language—check. Interesting, inventive use of words—check. Topics that reference matters of common interest—check. Insights way beyond the usual—check. Don’t skim this collection. You’d miss way too much that makes our lives meaningful. Enter and walk “unafraid in this new topography.”
—Sharon Scholl, Professor emerita of humanities. Author of Music and Culture, Death and the Humanities, and three chapbooks of poetry
WHEN YOU GET HERE is a celebration of the small, precise details that accumulate, like snowflakes, into a life. It’s a map, guiding us though a landscape of grief, wonder and sensuality, touching all the delicate connections in between. We peek in cupboards, wrestle with lovers, walk on thin ice, followed by a wolf. Every poem reminds the reader to breathe, sense, and feel what it is to be alive.
—Joyce Sweeney, author of Impermanence and Wake up, Finishing Line Press
Here Shutta Crum’s love of language takes us on a fascinating journey, gives us Driving Directions, promises the road knows the way. She opens Father’s Cupboard, lets us see what held his world. She studies A Philosophy of Luminescence in a confining marriage and offers new light. In You Can Have It Back she wants to return the rib taken from Adam and given to woman, for it no longer holds her aright after the death of a poet friend. In What I Bequeath, Shutta says one day her bones will speak a language we will understand. We are fortunate—in this beautiful collection, she speaks clearly to us and we understand.
—Chris Lord, author of Field Guide to Luck and What We Leave, founder of Word’n Woman Press
Shutta Crum’s poems are in Typehouse, Stoneboat, Southern Poetry Review, Beyond Words and 3rd Wednesday. Forthcoming: Main Street Rag. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Typehouse. When You Get Here (2020) won a gold Royal Palm Literary Award. For more info or to book as a speaker: www.shutta.com
Purchase From:
Kelsay Books / Indybound / Amazon
From our esteemed colleague, Marilyn Taylor.
A poem in Formal Verse: “Reading the Obituaries“
Wrinkles In Time and in Love / Nancy Jo Allen
Nancy Jo Allen proudly announces the release (March 20, 2021) of her first collection of poetry through her publisher Kelsay Books and Amazon. The book is entitled Wrinkles in Time and in Love, and includes the poem “Art” first published in Third Wednesday’s Vol.XI, No. 4 edition.
“Allen’s poems take us on a journey through the difficulties of relationship and identity: daughter, wife, mother, ex-wife, friend, and wife again. At each stage, we’re asked to reconsider our preconceptions and ideals in favor of the lived experience of those realities—a thoughtful and polished collection.”
—Marta Ferguson, former poetry editor for The Missouri Review, and author of Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett
“Nancy Jo Allen’s poems are deeply felt and well crafted. She has an excellent ear and eye.”
—Bruce Taylor is the former Poet Laureate of Eau Claire and host of Off the Page a reading series at the Local Store Gallery.
“Like the haiku, Allen’s poetry captures small moments of life with images from nature. And like a haiku, the collection is perfect in word, rhythm, and line. Through her poems, we travel through the landscape of memory and vicariously touch grief and let it go. We recognize defeat and replace it with contentment. We love again.”
—Lori Younker, author of Mongolian Interior: An Expatriate Experience and Sioux Beside Me, former Columbia Chapter Missouri Writers Guild president, and author and founder of World So Bright.org, a collection of cultural essays.
Nancy Jo Allen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and now lives in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband Terry and their pup Jayden.
Click to see a video recording of Nancy reading from Wrinkles in Time and in Love.
An Honest Hunger / Robert Lowes
“Robert Lowes addresses with wit and compassion topics we recognize: the body’s betrayals, unfulfilled desires, nostalgia, loss. Lowes’s love of words is apparent in his masterful soundwork and the equal skill with which he depicts the delicate beauty of a butterfly or slams home a devastating judgment on our human failings. A wide-ranging cast of characters wanders through these poems: a woman who keeps chickens, a Neanderthal buying an ax, a man with a fresh haircut, God. An Honest Hunger opens to us a world that is humorous and deeply serious, filled with signs and wonders, mischief and memories, unanswerable questions and unexpected redemptions–our world, the whole, sweet ‘slapstick ballet.'”
–Marjorie Stelmach, author of Walking the Mist and Falter
“If more poets wrote like Robert Lowes, more people would read poetry. In An Honest Hunger, his debut collection, Lowes never holds the reader at a distance. Here, the poet speaks with straightforward intelligence and acumen–and a pitch-perfect natural friendliness–without a scintilla of sentimentality. And his imagery is sublime. . . . An Honest Hunger appeals to humanity’s better self and reminds us that we are united not so much by our strengths as by our woundedness.”
–Robert Nazarene, Editor-in-Chief, The American Journal of Poetry, author of Empire de la Mort
“In poems that range from elegiac to exuberant, Robert Lowes’s An Honest Hunger is a joyful dance with everyday life. It is a book full of faith and doubt, anger and suffering, but one still laugh-out-loud funny. Lowes’s hunger for God, for meaning in life, makes this book the one to read now, when this hunger is more universal and pressing than ever.”
–Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of America that island off the coast of France, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
An Honest Hunger by Robert Lowes was published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf & Stock Publishers, in April 2020. It’s avialable now from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Driving Test / Ken Hines
Here is 3rd Wednesday’s poem of the week from the just released Spring issue. This is one of 3 winning poems from our annual contest.
White Storm / Gary Metras
White Storm by Gary Metras, (Rockford, MI: Presa Press, Feb. 2018)
ISBN 978-0-9965026-9-6; 88 pp. $15.95
Two poems included in White Storm were first published in the Summer 2010 issue of Third Wednesday:
Short Listed for the Massachusetts Poetry Book of the Year, Mass. Center for the Book, 2019
“There is always something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it it the accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a place on your bookshelf.”
—Zvi A. Sesling, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.
“The 48 poems in White Storm are written in an accessible, descriptive style; sometimes foreboding, sometimes a bit rueful, as though the narrator is chuckling to himself….Metras finds meaning in the natural world and offers a thoughtful meditation on life’s mysteries.”
—Steve Pfarrer, The Daily Hampshire Gazette
“In White Storm, Gary Metras has given us a poetry of reflections….His poems often have a classic, lyric and almost mythological bearing as if he sometimes channels ancients, but without losing direct contemporaneity of language….but how words travel off the page to carry us beyond ourselves for others, a legacy of sounds we may savor and hold close in our lives. I highly recommend this collection by a poet young in his upper years.”
—David Giannini, Wilderness House Literary Review
“The poems in White Storm create perfectly crafted worlds from carefully chosen details. Like a wise and patient teacher, Gary Metras takes us from wherever we are at the moment and drops us into the world of these poems, guiding us through a place full of love and light that is still never quite what it seems.”
—Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones #19, Posted October 1, 2018
Orders:
http://presapress.com/books/white-storm
Gary Metras’s new book of poetry is River Voice II (Adastra Press 2020). The Author of twenty books and chapbooks of poetry, his poems have appeared in America, The Common, Poetry, Poetry East, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where, in April 2018, he was appointed as the city’s inaugural Poet Laureate.
